Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday March 24, 2011 @04:50PM
from the number-of-a-thousand-beasts dept.

RabidMonkey writes "Microsoft has managed to purchase 666,624 IP addresses from the bankrupt Canadian company Nortel for $7.5 million. This works out to $11.25/ip. An exact list of blocks isn't available yet. There has been a lot of discussion on NANOG about whether this allowed or not, and what the implications to the dwindling IPv4 pool may be. Is this the first of many such moves as IPv4 address space has run out? Will ARIN step in and block the sale/transfer? How long will such measures drag out the eventual necessity of IPv6?"

People are being thrown out of their homes for NO REASON other then a clerical error or because they were suckered by the American Dream of getting rich - in real estate in this case.

Micrsoft is smal potatoes by today's standards.

Actually they wre always small potatoes but some dorks made their software the center of their lives. Good Grief! Get a fuckign grip! MS can have a 100% monopoly on software and it'll only affect 1% of my life... BFD!

Does this mean that companies will start selling IP addresses for increasing amounts of money? should I buy a block of 100 as an investment now? A bit like buying up domain names?

Not bloody likely. Most likely Microsoft will dump what they don't need. With IPv6 around the corner it's like buying 666,000 ice cream cones on a hot Summer day - better use them up before they are no use anymore.

Yes, adoption of IPv6 is coming along VERY smoothly; large corporations are being EXTREMELY cooperative about converting to the new standard, thereby ensuring that we will NOT abruptly run out of internet addresses -- in keeping with their usual policy of extreme foresightedness.

IPv6 around the corner? It's been around the corner for what now, a decade? Do you see anyone use it? I don't. I'm not even certain most ISPs would route it correctly.

So two very wierd things happened in the last three months, which make me believe "this time is different":

1.) At a fairly high level meeting in a DoD acquisition project, for the very first time, I heard someone ask "Is the new version IPv6 compatible?" and get a specific list of incompatibilities back, no less. Not "what is our plan? or when are we implementing?" But "Is it compatible?" with an honest get-well plan, and an answer based on an actual test regime....

2.) I saw the IPv4 spec on a list of "retired standards" for a specific future deployment date.

Its happening slowly, and painfully, but IPv6 is, finally, no shit, happening.

1. There's money to be made of a scarce resource.2. It cost money to upgrade equipment and implement IPv6.3. Because of #2, it no longer makes #1 reliant, and thus will not drive a higher profit margin.4. They'll double NAT home user accounts to free up IPv4, and charge extra for a real public IP.5. Implementing #4 causes havoc with P2P and other server-side applications. They want to download anyways, not upload.

In order for IPv6 to be rolled out, I fear the FCC will need to get involved (as with HDTV). And that's just for the US.

I have no doubt the US will be among the last countries to get widespread IPv6 adoptation. Most major Swedish ISPs (Telia, etc) say they will start giving everyone both IPv4 and IPv6 in 2013, and drop IPv4 by 2015. They may delay, the IPv4 drop will depend on how the rest of the world are doing, but still: There will be no local market for IPv4 by 2014. Maby you can still sell address space to poor people like those in the US, who knows, all I'm saying is that the local market, and probably the whole EU market, for IPv4 will be dead soon.

Why would the ISPs care about playing havoc? NATing will break P2P (Which competes with the ISPs own television service), Video on demand (Same), VoIP (Which competes with the ISPs phone service)... they can screw over any potential competition, and in a completly deniable way.

The only reason NAT is a problem for VOIP is because the standard VOIP protocol (SIP) was designed as a peer to peer system. This gives lower costs and slightly better performance but it also makes it very fragile in the case of NAT.

It's perfectly possible to implement VOIP as a traditional client-server protocol (for example IAX) which should work fine with NAT. Downside is that all calls have to be routed via a server but often that is desirable anyway.

Sales of IP addresses have been common place since about the late 90's or so. I had a class C block for 15 years and had offers many times, but I turned my block into ARIN about 1.5 years ago (yes, it was assigned to me for personal use before the Internet was commercialized, they used to do this). Microsoft has done nothing different from what many other companies have been doing for years. I bet Google has bought IP addresses from companies and individuals. This story only exists because it's "Microsoft".

I would imagine their new datacenter expansions might require a bit of addresses(no idea how many would be actually needed without seeing their network design)to support windows phone 7 and related apps.

600k+ addresses is a bit much though, unless they have plans to offer natting/tunneling services for windows 7 phones, perhaps to ease ipv6 issues on the part of their partners?

Unless they see it as an investment that pays off in the long run. Not that any companies are run that way. But Microsoft wants Windows running on all your home devices, and ipv6 is a building block in that goal.

it is so horrible that microsoft are bailing out a bankrupt businss buy buying assets from them for more than what they are worth... allowing the company to pass the money down to employees that have lost wages... i cant think of anything worse

it is so horrible that microsoft are bailing out a bankrupt businss buy buying assets from them for more than what they are worth... allowing the company to pass the money down to employees that have lost wages... i cant think of anything worse

If this was for Nortel's employee's benefit then shouldn't they auction them off instead of selling them to Microsoft? I'm sure they could get more than $11.25 a piece on the open market.

They are hemorraging assets left and right. By this time next year I doubt there will be any employees left at "Nortel". It's too bad because they were a major player for so long. That NT-1 switch is a real work horse.

We had their 0x32 hybrid switch. Bought it back in 1994 and it was the perfect phone system for small to medium sized companies. **266344. I smile every time I walk into a place and see the phones cause I know that code.

We donated it to a church/school in 2000 and other than the HD dying in the voice mail unit, it is still chugging along today. Funny thing is we paid $197,000 for it in 1994. When the HD died in 2007 I was able to buy a release 4 (with OS/2!) voice mail for $259.

I am the IT manager for a smallish company, and we recently purchased another block of 128 addresses even though we only need some of those right now, since we want to be in a position to accommodate for future growth over the next several years.

It is pre 1997 and pre-ARIN, which is not subject to any of the transfer restrictions or guidelines ARIN as since imposed.
Since it is grandfathered in, it is not subject to the annual maintenance dues.
Let me know if anyone is interested.

This has to go before the judge, etc., so it hasn't actually happened yet. No word as to whether or not ARIN will contest it (as IP addresses are not supposed to be property; they are assigned by ARIN, which reserves rights to take them back) or, if it does, whether or not the judge would pay attention.

The only real way to ensure that we don't run out of IP space is to rent them, not sell them. Charge a "property tax" of $1 per IP a month and you'll see tons of organizations with class A blocks give back IP space that they weren't using anyway because they can't afford $16M a month. No organization should ever need more than a few class Cs of publicly routable IP space.

Seems like a pretty stupid investment to me. When we run out of IP4 addresses, then we'll just move to IP6. The IP4 addresses will become worthless obsolete abstract allocations. That's what happens when you try to hoard a completely artificial resource.

They may be figuring that during the transition (or after) that having a big block of them, especially for legacy services would be worthwhile. There's probably a lot of infrastructure out there that won't ever switch to IPv6 gracefully (if at all), but might be important. Sort of like IE6 that won't die. I suspect there will be a lot of custom equipment/servers that will need to keep plugged into IPv4 long after the rest of us have moved to IPv6.

Strictly speaking, "666000." would be wrong. "666000" is merely ambiguous; without the trailing period, or another equivalent mark, it could have between three and six significant digits, inclusive. (See also Identifying significant digits [wikipedia.org])

Really good point. But this sort of "insider trading" isn't regulated by the FCC or anyone else with legal authority. ARIN can refuse to transfer the numbers to Microsoft's control, but it's easy to do an end-run around this by keeping a "shell Nortel" around. The judge could stop it, but it's not his job to do so.

Problem, though. Microsoft have also invested heavily in digital home things - DLNA, that sort of tech - and the continued deployment of that is really dependant in large part on eventually going to IPv6.